By Mad Max: Fury Road was a sort of revelation for me. I’ve never been much into action movies, but Fury Road looked cool and weird, and all the praise it received captured my interest. There have been more than enough pieces written about how Fury Road redefined action movies when it came out, so I won’t go into tired detail on the subject, but I walked out of the theater feeling like Fury Road was a single point, a line. I was sure that we would be able to look at action movies as pre-and-post-Fury Road.
But we all have our most hyperbolic thoughts when we walk out of the theater, endorphins still kicking through our systems. Action movies have largely remained unchanged, and now it looks like we won’t even get the planned sequels to Fury Road.
Where art meets business is usually a shitty, scum-streaked sort of place, with the current legal filings between Warner Bros and George Miller standing as another example of great art being ruined over money.
The crux of this legal dispute is that Miller was going to get paid a $7 million bonus, if he was able to shoot the movie under its $157 million budget. He believes he did, but Warner Bros has a different picture of the film’s costs.
After Miller had a first cut of the movie, Warner Bros decided there needed to be changes, and the two agreed to $31 million in reshoots. It seems that difference between Miller’s number ($154.6 million) and Warner Bros’ number ($185.1 million) could lie in whether or not these reshoots were added onto the original shooting budget or not.
There’s no doubt that Fury Road had a long, troubled, and grueling production, but it looks now that additional production companies moved in, and Warner Bros had originally wanted a 100-minute PG-13 movie out of Miller. It’s a muddy situation, as these legal battles usually are, and it will be up to the Supreme Court of New South Wales to decide.
This puts the future of the franchise in real jeopardy, though, and that’s a horrible shame. The Fury Road movies could have towered above the usual action landscape, but I’d wager that our best bet on seeing them come to life now will be an eventual comic book adaptation of the screenplays.
I really hope I’m wrong.
Bitter court battle over Mad Max: Fury Road blocks two new movies [The Sydney Morning Herald]
